Successor Console — Tutorial

Someone retires after thirty years. Their mailbox is handed to you, and every answer you need is somewhere inside a hundred thousand messages you can't search meaningfully. This turns that pile into a reviewed knowledge pack your organisation's Copilot agent can answer from — with citations back to real emails.

What this is not. It does not create a digital version of the person, and it must never be presented as one. Every word in the pack is a verbatim copy of something they actually wrote, carrying a link to the email it came from. Nothing is generated, paraphrased, or written in their voice. The agent's ground rules say plainly: never speak as the person. What you get is a cited archive of precedent — which is both more honest and more useful than an impression of someone.

Before you start

You need Full Access to the mailbox, granted by IT. The add-in uses delegated permissions, so it can only open what your own account has already been given. If IT hasn't granted access, nothing here will work — and that's the correct behaviour.

Do this before they leave, if you possibly can. The pack includes an auto-generated exit interview built from the gaps — and those questions are only worth having while there's still someone to ask.

Part 1 — Navigate the mailbox

1. Open Successor Console from the ribbon.

2. Set Mailbox to scan (blank scans your own; otherwise the shared mailbox address), the Owner's name, and Years back. Click Scan mailbox.

You should see four tabs fill in:

Tab	What it answers
People	Who they actually corresponded with, ranked — the real network, not the org chart.
Open items	Asks that never got answered, in both directions. This is your live handoff list, and it's the tab to read first on day one.
Topics	A deterministic map of what they worked on.
Files	Searchable attachment index, each linked to the email that carried it.

This half is useful on its own. Even if you never build a pack, Open items on the first morning is worth the install.

Part 2 — Build the knowledge pack

Under Build the knowledge pack, set Max precedent pairs and a Destination — paste a SharePoint folder link, which is what you want if the pack is to become an organisational agent. Click Build knowledge pack.

You get a folder of .docx files:

File	Contents
`manifest.docx`	Provenance, and a review sign-off line for a human to put their name on.
`people.docx`, `open-items.docx`, `projects.docx`, `attachments.docx`	The four views above, as documents.
`precedents/<topic>.docx`	Real questions with their real answers, verbatim, each linked to its source email. This is the substance.
`Exit interview - <name>.docx`	Questions auto-generated for the topics where the written record is thin — the things decided on the phone.
`README.txt`	The 30-second recipe for creating the agent, plus preflight checks.
`REVIEW-PROMPTS.txt`	Optional Copilot prompts that help a human do the review.
`Ask the Archive.agent`	A best-effort ready-made SharePoint agent file. Convenience only — the manual recipe in README.txt is the supported path, because the format is community-documented rather than official.

Why .docx and not Markdown: Markdown isn't usable agent knowledge in SharePoint. Files are also kept small deliberately — unlicensed tenants skip SharePoint files over 7 MB, and a pack that silently isn't indexed is worse than no pack.

Part 3 — Review. This is not optional.

The pack is a review gate, and the whole design depends on you using it as one. Read every file. Delete anything that shouldn't become institutional knowledge — personal correspondence, HR matters, a candid assessment of a colleague, anything confidential or exempt. Then sign the line in manifest.docx.

This is the entire reason the tool builds a pack instead of pointing an agent at the raw mailbox. A mailbox contains things that must never be answerable by a chatbot the whole division can query. Grounding an agent on unreviewed mail would leak them, quietly and at scale.

Only after review: follow README.txt to create the agent from the pack.

Why it works this way

Deterministic extraction, never generation. The add-in makes no AI calls at all. It copies and links. AI enters only later, at question time, when your Copilot agent reads the finished pack — so an answer cites a real decision the person really made, with the email attached, instead of producing a fluent paraphrase nobody can check.

That distinction is the product. A summary of what someone believed is an opinion with no author. A quoted decision with a date and a link is evidence, and a successor can act on evidence.

Permissions and data

Three delegated permissions: Mail.Read, Mail.Read.Shared, Files.ReadWrite.All. No backend, no AI calls, no data collection. The pack is written to your organisation's own OneDrive or SharePoint and never leaves the Microsoft 365 boundary.